


Vignettes

by parboiledcrustacean



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Shorter one shots, Soulmates, The Terror Bingo 2020, Witchcraft AU, survival AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:34:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27563893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parboiledcrustacean/pseuds/parboiledcrustacean
Summary: Shorter fills as part of the Terror Bingo.'Crew's Quarters' - Tozer/Armitage Witchcraft AU'Salt Pork' - Tozer & Hodgson Survival AU'Implication' - Gibson/Tozer Soulmates
Relationships: Lt George Hodgson & Sgt Solomon Tozer, Thomas Armitage/Sgt Solomon Tozer, William Gibson/Solomon Tozer
Kudos: 10
Collections: The Terror Bingo





	1. Tozer/Armitage - Crew's Quarters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's not a talented witch. But he can help with this.

He’d had an Irish grandmother: a seanmháthair, all iron hair and soft hands.  
All his kind had. He’d heard of someone who had heard Crozier speak of his, and Tommy had smiled imagining a mirror of his own with the captain's scowl and drink-fattened face.   
He had lost his own to a mob. They'd disliked her for speaking truths they weren’t ready for. And Tommy Armitage had learned to keep his mouth shut.

He’s not a seer. In fact his words often muddle themselves, dancing until the rings are the wrong side of the lines on his paper in front of him. They had led Solomon to correct him the first time they’d spoken, by requesting a third o in his name instead of an a which he’d scribbled out immediately, scarlet with embarrassment. Solomon’s not the usual type of soldier, capable of his own letters and no others. He reads the back pages of the year-old newspapers when there's little else to do, mocking the comments. He writes long words with neat looped handwriting and can tell the difference even when he writes in an angry scribbled hand. He can’t, however, tell the difference between human and witch. Between Tommy and the powers he possesses. The realisation comes as an enormous relief.

He’d noticed his ear.   
The recruitment office had done the same, Tommy explained, and denied him his post. He's not deaf in it, despite what they seem to have presumed when he had frozen. When fear had set his jaw shut. When they'd touched the knot of flesh he'd grown his hair in long tangles to hide.  
The witch's mark. His grandmother had smiled and stroked it the same way. Hers, he remembers, was on her foot: a gnarled, useless lump of flesh like a rabbit's paw. After they'd burnt her, he'd taken up scissors-  
Cowered after the first snip. Wept. Let his poor all-too-human mother believe it was grief.  
He'd frozen for the irrational, ingrown fear that they'd know. One of his old lovers had known (oh, how many things they would flay him for if they could) but they're blind to it in England. Especially in the Navy, where red and blue eyes seek only coal and flags and glory.  
'You a boxer back home?'  
He'd smiled when he'd said it, voice kind and words mocking. He'd looked, with his broad shoulders, impressively like one himself. A statue. Body broad under his clothes. Tommy had smiled. Batted his eyes and let him believe what he liked.

He hadn't suspected Cornelius Hickey.  
His mark is a stretched, faded thing like a birthmark on the back of his knee, subtle enough even he wouldn't have spotted it if he hadn't known what to look for. He doesn't think Cornelius is a seer. If he is, he's kept it all private, not been prone to the shouts and spasms which marked his grandmother's cursed gift. Perhaps he is. Perhaps prophecies are what he whispers to Solomon when they're alone, or the reason why he smiles in Tommy's direction when he does.  
He sees that Tommy wants the sergeant. But that only establishes he's not blind.  
Jopson had seen it too. Gibson feeding him rumours of a third nipple somewhere under his furred chest had confirmed his suspicions: no human man could be that neat. He wonders sometimes why they're all here. Why so many have clotted in the crew's quarters of the HMS Terror, what could be drawing them all here.  
He shivers from more than the cold and decides he would rather not know.

He's not a talented witch.   
He's forgotten most of his grandmother's charms over the years, blown up enough kettles he no longer tries some of them indoors. He can't knit the skull back in place and hold Private Heather's brain safe within it. Can't wake the dead, or drag him back from his wax-sealed sleep.  
He can't stop the tremor in Solomon's frame or kiss the hole in his hand better. Those gifts are the realm of fairytales, happy endings in children's stories they had left in Greentithe a lifetime ago.  
He can, however, brew a tea that will force truth from its recipient. Or indigestion, depending on how long he leaves it to stew.  
He can make Solomon sleep soundly, and he does.

He doesn't like to sleep alone at night. In the day, his head will dip to wood as he snatches rest. At night he seeks the gunroom because it's quiet, because it's still, because Tommy doesn't care.  
He'd feared, the first time he had performed his charm, that he'd made a mistake. That he'd simply closed his eyes and maddened him past words Solomon talks in his dreams.  
It's often incomprehensible, other times the humorous end of a one-sided conversation.  
Sometimes it's a name. Never his own.  
Cornelius isn't affecting him here. Solomon's dreams aren't the whims of witches: the man's just beautiful. Pale as moonlight. Lively in a way two years of reduced rations shouldn't let him be, spirit burning as bright and as angry as his hair. Tommy doesn't share in the lust Cornelius' name shapes his mouth into, the low want in his throat when his sleeping form sounds his name. Of course jealousy eats at him. The blind looks the man subjects him to, the warmth of his smile don't follow him into his slumber, though their bodies lie closer than Solomon's ever managed with the caulker's mate. He could tell him of the man's dalliances with Gibson. Break his heart. His craft can't shape the dreams he slips Solomon into. Nor can it keep the man out of his own.

It could if he made the man love him.   
He thinks of it sometimes. Thinks of illicit rituals performed under the moon, of wives attaining rings then the same swell. Thinks of the absent, slavish looks on the faces of men he's seen given them, the drunk stumbling of their feet.  
Can't reconcile it.

They lie on opposite benches and Tommy counts down the hours.

A clang of bells above. The thrill of touching the muscled shoulder of the man he loves, of hearing his groan-lengthened name.  
The chance evaporates. Solomon will get up and perform his duties. Tommy will stay in his storeroom and polish guns and desire him in his absence, pray to whatever he still holds that the man returns safe.

Solomon always smiles for him when he wakes.  
It creases his face, slow as the dawn and more regular: the sun only rises in half these strange seasons which mark the end of the world.  
'Ta, Tommy.'   
His name. A smile. Warmth.   
In this cold place, that's enough.


	2. Tozer & Hodgson - Salt Pork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They walk.

They eat the tins until the tins shrink hollow, the sludge fuelling Solomon’s attempt to gather rocks. It’s a tricky task with two working arms: the last time he tried to raise the weight of his dead left one the pain left him in a rush of bile between his teeth. Knowing this, George helps.

They leave a mountain range of stones behind them but for Cornelius, whose coat Solomon buries. Of all their tasks this takes them the longest, makes George feel the angriest, makes him want to scream at his companion and remind him of the reason for his broken arm. Solomon digs.

His teeth can’t handle the sturdiness or jerky any more, nor his stomach the richness of meat. It’s a funny turn of events for a man without a sense of humour, gentlemen sickened by food too good for the working man. Here they aren’t those types. 

They are Solomon Tozer and George Hodgson, the surviving men of the Franklin expedition. The ones who buried the spirit. The last ones left.

When Solomon cries out in his sleep it still frightens him. Makes him envision the creature clawing loose from its tomb and laughing in the severed voice of Hickey’s tongue and makes him seek to silence it, shushing until the man wakes. Only two of them remain, Solomon pointed out in the morning, when the light restored the strength to his voice. It’s less to pack. To carry. And so George Hodgson finds himself sharing another man’s tent.

He stops the screaming. He clings close and stops his blueing fingers by dipping them into the other man’s bag. Later, he coughs up his teeth.

‘Leave me.’  
He means it. He’s tired.

‘No.’  
Solomon means it. He’s furious.

The salt pork’s boiled in a Goldners Tin. It tastes like the brine they seek to the East, the black and white ink of the sea Solomon's determined to sail them home on. They walk.


	3. Implication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s an ugly implication, but one easily hidden.

The first time he had touched Sergeant Solomon Tozer, the man had set fire to his finger.  
It had been Cornelius’ fault, as their current situation is: the smirking gravity of the sun who forms their orbit trying to remake the world in his image. Smoking remains a shared trait, so that day he had pressed three papers to William’s hand, eyes knowing, smile is slight. William had been tempted to remind him of his ability to roll them himself, that he'd been oh-too happy to roll the other man's for weeks, a silent refusal to take part in a dance obvious to all but their bone-headed third counterpart.  
William had rolled them, knowing the stakes were higher than his dislike for the Sergeant. The Sergeant, disagreeing, had deliberately set his finger alight and sworn back at Billy's curses.  
  
It hadn’t make sense for him to lie about it. Hadn't made sense at all until the corner of the Sergeant's face had split.  
  
Willliam isn’t a rich, stupid maid tales of true love are told to. He still sneers at happy endings accredited to them, knows from smug testimony most soul marks are grease paint and trickery, an artful recreation of the mole visible on a debutante's face. They aren't real. He wouldn’t care if they were: he wouldn't touch Tozer with a salt-washed bargepole. Furthermore, he reminds himself, they are supposed to match. The same shape, the same colour. The matching scar on his ankle had been an accident with a hot stove, a smile healed pale years ago. It’s laughable to presume anyone could endure a bond with Tozer: knows Cornelius (whose skin had been marble until the lashing) is using him for the fat hardness in his trousers and the weakness that screams within his chest (He pities the poor sod who mirrors the state of Cornelius' arse).  
If it was Tozer’s - he had decided, hot with the venom of seeing them too close again - he would cut the damn thing out of himself.  
  
  
It’s an ugly implication, but one easily hidden. It smiles back at him whenever he changes his socks, but coils safe beneath his socks. Until it dosn’t.  
He’d stumbled with the boat. The sky and the earth had been the same painful grey, blurred into eachother, and William had met shale with hand and foot and clothes and torn a slit the length of his calf. Solomon's the one to tell him that last part. Cornelius wouldn't, Cornelius is busy on a hilltop making his arms the horizon, and so William had awoken in Goodsir’s tent forced to meet eyes too wide to be accusing.  
  
"Your leg."  
  
The cold is worse when he wakes. It crushes hard at the bones of his fingers and bruises the bare skin of his leg, turns that thing he doesn’t want an ugly puce. His ‘soulmate’ can’t speak to him. Is probably too stupid to do so or far worse, pities him. Although William's dying, at least he’s dying _right_ about the falsehood of it all, the lies told by lonely men whose wives don't want. It doesn’t stop him embarrassing himself. Tears fall when the salt eats into his leg, hot things that sear like the pain does up every nerve in his leg. He’s startled, despite it, by his companion starting upright and twisting his body away. _Some lover,_ William scoffs. _Coward_ dies breathless on his lips, body buckled by the weight of buttons as the tent flaps closed behind him. Warm and heavy and too red, a coat folds like an embrace around his frame.


End file.
